HowTo: Pipe scp to STDOUT

The short answer: don't

Instead, use ssh. You can specify a command to do when ssh logs in. for example

Code:

$ ssh work.workdomain 'echo "testing"'

Let's say you have a file foo.tar.bz2 on a remote server (work.workdomain) that you would like to extract on your local server, and lets say that this is a very large file, so you don't want to download it, then extract.

One way around this problem is to do the following:

Code:

$ ssh work.workdomain 'cat foo.tar.bz2' | tar -jxv

This will transfer the whole archive, and extract it to the current directory.